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Human origins: Search for roots that Darwin started

By Tim D. White

Today, thanks to a range of discoveries and technologies, we can tell in amazing detail the story that Darwin only guessed at

Charles Darwin’s only remark about human evolution in his seminal work On The Origin of Species was that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”. In his autobiography, Darwin justifies his brevity&colon; “It would have been useless and injurious… to have paraded, without giving any evidence, my conviction with respect to his origin.” His boldest statement was in The Descent of Man, where he concluded&colon; “It is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” Today, thanks to a range of discoveries and technologies, we can tell in amazing detail the story that Darwin only guessed at.

Not from chimps

Nineteenth-century sceptics illustrated what many people saw as the implausibility of human evolution with a cartoon depicting Darwin’s head atop the body of a knuckle-walking chimpanzee. Even though Darwin was clear from the start that we had not evolved from living chimpanzees, similar ideas, and the “missing link” concept, have stuck with us.

Darwin’s champion, Thomas Huxley, concluded from his own anatomical studies of African apes that they were our closest living relatives, a conclusion vindicated when molecular studies showed – and continue to show – how genetically close these animals are to us. Ironically, Darwin was almost alone in calling for restraint in the use of modern primates as “stand-in”, proxy ancestors.

The recent discovery of human ancestors that were quite unlike chimps, dating from soon after the two lines split, has shown …